


Memento

by spacehopper



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, Post-Dishonored: Death of the Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2019-06-10 08:42:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15287838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacehopper/pseuds/spacehopper
Summary: Billie never saw ghosts before. Not real ones, at least. But she saw more these days than anyone, except maybe the Outsider himself.





	Memento

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kay_obsessive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_obsessive/gifts).



There was a woman screaming in the Void. Faded fury and fingers like knives, and Billie didn’t know a damn thing about her. Someone she killed, whose lover, daughter, brother she killed? Certainly not someone she loved. Even the flings were precious enough relief she remembered every woman, every man. Maybe the spirit was nothing to do with her at all. Maybe she just wanted to scream.

In her waking hours, Billie tried to put it behind her. Strange enough to remember her twisting dreams, to see their shattered reflections in the dirty grey brick of Dunwall’s slums and the shivering waters of its blood blackened harbor. Too many ghosts, and Billie got enough trouble from the living.

But the woman won’t leave her alone. 

Coins exchanged hands, sleep darts and stun mines, a mission for the Empress that Emily never sanctioned but needed more than she knew. In the shadows in the back of the shop, Billie saw her again, spear of an arm extended, impaling Billie with a wordless accusation. She took her supplies, walked down the street, and ignored the shifting form in the fragmented remains of a shop, still broken from Delilah’s reign. Only when Billie began setting her trap in what they were back to calling the Rudshore Financial did she finally have enough.

Icy fingers encircled her throat, passing through skin and muscle and breath. Not a damn thing they could do, but it was distracting, and Billie didn’t have time for it. So she readied her Void cursed knife and spun, slicing those seeking fingers clean off the hand. The spirit shrieked in impotent rage, mouth a dark, silent circle. But she left Billie alone after that, and that was good enough for her.

Warier now, the spirit dogged her from a distance, slinking between doorways and along alley walls. More persistent than most, and even if she couldn’t do a thing she was damned annoying. As Billie wound her way down a side street, padded silently up the stairs, she hoped that the bastard had a solution behind the inevitable cryptic words and the pale knowing smirk. 

“Ah, Billie Lurk, to what do I owe the pleasure?” Clearly some habits died hard, because the man who was once the Outsider sat on a rickety stool clutching whale bone in his hands. Fingers dark, not with blood. Oil from some deep sea monster, now swimming on dry yellow bone. 

“You know why I’m here,” she said. He set the bone aside and dried his hands. His eyes were fixed on her, dark pupils surrounding by an eerie yellow almost worse than the black expanse she’d once found so enthralling. But that was before she’d met him, saw his petty revenge and then saw that perhaps it wasn’t so petty after all. Just some street kid broken into a god, and she couldn’t say she would’ve done better. 

“Even before I didn’t see everything, and I see far less now.” Condescension and amusement in equal measure. Some days Billie let him play his games. But today she’d already had more than enough.

“Sure. But you do see the spirit in the door.” Fading in and out, dissolving and reforming, a silent screaming watcher. It reminded Billie of the youngest Whalers, distant creatures of overconfidence and fear, wary and waiting and watching with envy in their eyes. 

“Haunting your footsteps,” the Outsider agreed. Billie rolled her eyes. “Jealousy is such a bitter poison.” He twirled a small green vial between his fingers, though where it’d come from she didn’t know. Only another smile greeted her when she plucked it out of his hands and tucked it into her belt.

“What, did I steal her woman? Her money?” Not her life, then. Not that Billie had thought that. Those ghosts tended to fade faster, like her presence drove in that final knife. Haunting your murderer wasn’t quite what the tales made it out to be. Mostly, the dead wanted rest. 

“Her power,” the Outsider said, picking the bone up again. He began to carve, deep lines in some unreadable pattern. Maybe something else in the language he spoke long ago. But not his name, never his name. Not anymore. “Or the power she thought should be hers. Always so boring, Galia Fleet.”

“Wait, Galia Fleet? Why does that name sound familiar?”

A brush of hair, the faintest stirrings on the back of her neck, and the spirit was in front of her, black mouth still screaming. Or no, not a mouth. A mask.

“A Whaler. Right, I remember. Never very bright. Competent, I guess.”

The Outsider laughed, the sound all the stranger for how normal it was. Entirely human, no echo of whale song or the aching vastness of the ocean. But still amused at the dealings of mortals, still learning to be one himself.

“She hated you, and envied you. She wanted your position, my mark, and most of all power. She thought all those were on in the same. And she lost her life pursuing them, like so many do.” He held the whale bone out to her, and she took it. Cold as death, and the oil was slimy but didn’t smear. She tucked it into her belt pouch alongside the poison. “You’re lucky, Billie. Cleverer than her, but still lucky.”

Billie snorted, but damn him, he was right. She’d like to think she was smarter than Galia Fleet. She’d survived, but it wasn’t just cleverness. Half dumb luck and the grace of others, letting her live long enough to learn the lessons and learn some sense. 

“You grew wiser with age, more cautious. You understood that power has its cost.” 

“And you’re always overcharged,” Billie said, throwing him a bag of coins. The Outsider nodded, and gave her a faint smile. 

“How do I get rid of her?”

“Plunge the knife deeper. She can’t fight you anymore.”

Better this way. One last kill, one last mercy for a ghost she barely knew. And maybe that’s what Galia wanted. Not to be forgotten. When Billie lifted the dagger, she didn’t flinch. In the silence that followed, Billie waited. 

And just for a moment, she remembered Galia Fleet.


End file.
